True to its promise, the European Space Agency’s EarthCARE satellite is now being used to calculate directly how clouds and aerosols influence Earth’s energy balance – the all-important balance that regulates our climate. In doing so, EarthCARE is poised to sharpen the accuracy of climate models, the very tools that guide global climate policy and action.
The animation shows how EarthCARE’s measurements can be used to provide accurate data on clouds to test and improve climate models. It first illustrates how data from EarthCARE’s cloud profiling radar (CPR), atmospheric lidar (ATLID) and multispectral imager (MSI) are combined to derive vertical slices of properties such as the cloud and precipitation water content – that is, water in liquid droplets, ice crystals, rain and snow.
Next, information from MSI’s horizontal imagery is used to extrapolate these vertical cloud profiles across the satellite’s track. By identifying pixels with similar optical properties, the system reconstructs the 3D cloud structure.
Using a computational technique known as radiative transfer modelling, this 3D cloud representation is then used to estimate how incoming sunlight is scattered by cloud particles and Earth’s surface, and consequently how much is reflected back to space.
In the animation, this calculated reflected sunlight appears as the blue-shaded shaded horizontal strip and the red line at the top. This is then compared against independent measurements by EarthCARE’s broadband radiometer (BBR), shown by the yellow line at the top, and the agreement is very good.
Read full story: EarthCARE lifts the clouds on climate models